I wish to thank David Collier and
Jonthan Hoffman for their time and
trouble in fact-checking my book, State of Terror. Given their
familiarity with the topic, their weeks spent in the National Archives
scrutinising my text for any possible flaws,
and especially that they approached the task from an adversarial
standpoint, I could have hoped for no better, more meticulous effort to weed
out any problems in this first printing that I had not yet caught. (I began an online list of
errata when the
book was first published, and I always ask readers check it.)

Indeed I was encouraged by how few issues of any merit they were able to uncover,
none of which affect the substance of the book.

I will refer to
the
59-page PDF critique as the ‘Report’, and to
Messrs. Hoffman and
Collier as ‘the authors’.

In their Report, the authors make two unrelated claims, which they treat as a single,
inextricably linked claim:
1. That my book, State of Terror, is academically unsound;
2. That it, and I, are anti-Semitic.

This second charge is to me far more serious than the Report’s academic
claims. To abuse the charge of
anti-Semitism trivializes actual hatred against Jews.

The most
serious allegation of anti-Semitism appears not just in the
Report, but has also been disseminated by Mr. Hoffman via
Twitter:

This was tweeted
without explanation. My book makes no reference whatsoever to Mengele or his experiments, and the
document he illustrates has no relevance. Yet the tweet insinuates that I doubt the veracity of Mengele's experiments (and, by
extension, suggests Holocaust denial).

The "explanation" is found in the Report. It concerns an
endnote in my book in which I explain an exchange I had with Israeli
professor Yosef Grodzinsky, regarding contradictory
records about IDF Major General Yossi Peled. This is the offending end note
in full.

According to the authors, Peled's mother was a survivor of Mengele’s
experiments; according to Professor Grodzinsky, both parents died in the
war.
Whether the authors, or Professor Grodzinsky, is correct, is
immaterial to the issue at hand. What is at issue is that the content of my endnote was falsified to fabricate the image of me as virtually a
Holocaust denier, a doubter of the human experiments perfomed on Jews in
concentration camps. Thus falsified, Messrs. Collier and
Hoffman conclude in their Report that this endnote
“best highlights the disdain Suarez has for the
Holocaust and Jewish life in general.”

Online, the authors advertise their Report with statements
like
“The book is dripping with racial hatred against Jews ... this book is
an antisemitic fraud.”
“The authors [sic] hatred of Jews runs through the book. Like blood in
an animal, the book has no life without it.”

From Mr. Collier's web site, mockery of actual anti-Semitism for his
political purposes:“[He is a] rabid little man, motivated by
hatred ... The message that is screaming from the pages
as you turn them is that this is an author who has issues with Jews...
This book has an antisemitic stench from the very first page to the very
last and Thomas Suarez wrote every word of it. Suarez even included in
this libel Jews who wanted a bi-national state.*
It is inhumane, racist, and against Jews, clearly antisemitic.”(* RE libelling Jews who wanted a bi-national
state, I have no idea what this is about. The only person who I discuss
who was active in the bi-national state move was Judah Leon
Magnes, whom my book presents in a wholly favorable, almost heroic
light.)

The web site goes so far as to issue what, to
me, feels like a threat:

“We see you. We know what you
are.”

Book Launch ?
In its beginning “Executive Summary”, the authors repeat the
falsehood that “The book [State of Terror] was honoured with a launch inside a meeting
room in the House of Lords.” This claim of an illegal book launch at the
House of Lords was already
filed by Mr. Hoffman with the HoL, and dismisssed by its Committee for
Privileges and Conduct (HL Paper 142, 15 March 2017). Yet the authors repeat the invention
as fact
in the Report, even after Mr. Hoffman was formally told by the HoL
that there was no such launch, no such breech of HoL regulations.

The Quakers
Similarly, in his online advertisement for the Report, Mr. Hoffman
repeats his earlier falsehoods against the Quakers regarding their
cancellation of a talk I was to give at the Friends Meeting House in
Cambridge. This is an extraordinary case of manipulation, as it was Mr. Hoffman himself
who created
the situation that he then mispresents and exploits.

The following is a statement from the Quakers regarding this abuse
(with permission):

Elders of Jesus Lane Friends
Meeting (Quakers) are concerned at the continuing
misrepresentation by Jonathan Hoffman and others regarding the
decision made by Cambridge Jesus Lane Quaker Meeting to cancel a
talk by Tom Suarez in May 2017.

To be clear, we want it to be
known that this decision was arrived at under pressure of time
and with incomplete information, in response to a request to
reconsider the booking.

Jesus Lane Meeting has a long historical relationship supporting
Palestinian refugees dating back to the early 1970s and we
continue to engage on the issues in the Middle East. Since the
cancelled booking some of us have attended the talk by Tom
Suarez, which was relocated, or watched a recording of it. Some
have purchased the book and read it. Friends (Quakers) who have
read the book or seen the video recording of Tom’s talk have no
reservations about Tom Suarez or his work.

—
Tom Suárez, 9 September, 2017

Part 2, the academic issues
raised:

The Report is in part a rehash of Mr. Hoffman’s failed
complaint to the House of Lords, now in a formal, academic-looking
presentation. Of the new material added, a few isolated points have in
fact been helpful to me, though most of the Report is a sequence of "red herrings"
and misrepresentations.

The Report divides evidence against my book into nine principal
issues, which they call the “Nine Pillars” on which my book is built,
though this is confusing because a few of the biggest complaints are not
included in these.

My various conclusions that most upset the authors were
invariably based on cumlulative evidence and the course of events, not a
single document that they have isolated and framed as my alleged sole
proof.

Rather than engage in a laborious untangling of the 59-page document, I will respond directly to the "Nine
Pillars"
themselves, and five further issues not
included in the "Pillars".

Herewith their statement :

The Suarez book ‘State of Terror’ is built on
nine pillars. Some of these are truly absurd:• #1. That the book was built on diligent
research• #2. That Zionist terror was the reason for
Partition• #3. That Zionist actions were part of a
‘master plan’, rather than a reaction to events• #4. That Zionists and Jews were two
different groups, with little or no intersection• #5. That Zionists had no respect for human
life, least of all that of Jews• #6. That between 1933 & 1949, the Jews of
Europe had somewhere to go, other than Palestine• #7. That the British were impartial
observers• #8. That 1948 was not a civil war, but
rather Zionist aggressors picking a fight with peaceful Arabs• #9. That the Hagana secretly supported the
actions of the Irgun.

Herewith my responses:

1. Whether or not my book was “built on diligent research” depends on
the subsequent eight “pillars”, so there’s nothing to comment here.

2. I stand by my claim that “Zionist terror was the reason for
Partition”.
• British documents cite “intensification of Jewish terrorism” (that is,
'intensification' beyond the years of already relentless Zionis
terrorism) that would follow if Partition (i.e., Zionist statehood) were
not approved. But the authors reinterpret the report's “intensification
of Jewish terrorism” (over that already ravaging Palestine) as “civil
disobedience”. This is nothing short of comical.
• The Report ignores my voluminous evidence of the several years of relentless Zionist terror
specifically to force Zionist statehood,
for which Partition became the means to statehood and afterwards
expansion. As one
report put it, Partition was a “temporary expedient,” a necessary
annoyance tolerated by the Jewish Agency on the way to seizing as much
of the land as possible.
•
The Report dismisses my proof that the US & UK knew by early
1948 at the latest that there would be no Palestinian state, by treating Abdullah’s deal with the Zionists as though it
happened by itself, with no complicity by the latter. This is untrue and
irrelevant.
•
Finally, it fails
to explain — even if one ignores all the rest — why the Jewish Agency
/Israeli government not only ultimately refused to abide by Partition,
but indeed began abrogating it within days of Resolution 181.

3. I absolutely stand by my claim that the Zionist expropriation and
ethnic cleansing of Palestine was intended all along, not “a reaction to
events” — though I never use the term "master plan" that the Report
alleges. The evidence is overwhelming. The key leaders, people like
Weizmann and Ben-Gurion, from the Balfour period and on, explicitly
state that they plan to take all of Palestine and ethnically cleanse it.
As with the previous issue, the very course of events vindicates this:
that's what they did and refused to undo.

4. As regards “Zionists and Jews were two different groups, with little
or no intersection,” I am not sure what the authors are accusing me of.
Zionism is a political movement. There is of course "intersection" between
Jews (and non-Jews) and Zionism, just as there is "intersection" between Jews
(or anyone else) and Communism, or vegetarianism, or any other -ism.
What is the issue here?

5. This allegation — “That Zionists had no respect for human life, least
of all that of Jews” — is a nonsensical caricature. There is nothing to
which to respond.

6. Regarding “between 1933 & 1949, the Jews of Europe had somewhere to
go, other than Palestine”:
• The Report’s silliness here is so blatant as to warrant quoting. The
bold emphasis is original:Suarez asserts that Roosevelt ‘provisionally
secured safe haven for half a million Displaced Persons’ (page 2851).
He never did ‘secure’ anything like this. He did try
(see Laqueur, op cit*) but it was never likely that his own country - the
US - would accept: opposition to large-scale migration (eg from the
trade unions) was just too strong. So ‘Zionist leaders’ could
not have ‘sabotaged’ an offer that never existed!(*Note that “Laqueur” is not my source for
this or anything else.)
This concerns Morris Ernst’s first-hand account of the Zionists' sabotage of President Roosevelt’s resettlement plan; but the
Report (above quote) dismisses this by saying that Jews were blocked from entering the
US, and that therefore there was nothing to sabotage, and so my claim is
false. This is circular nonsense: The fact is that Roosevelt believed he
could shame Congress into approving the plan if Britain did the same
(which Britain did), or even that he could enforce it without Congress.
The possibility that Roosevelt might have ultimately failed is
irrelevant to the issue — the issue, the only issue, is that the
Zionists did not want it, and sabotaged the attempt, so Roosevelt never even got to
try. This is not in question: Morris Ernst was vilified by them for
supporting the plan. • In a bait-&-switch, the Report quotes Professor John Quigley and from Moshe Menuhin, upon whom
I
do not rely for this claim, then dismisses them as anti-Zionists writing
long after the fact (though in the case of Menuhin, this is
additionally disingenuous, as he was a first-hand witness; the fact that his book was
published in 1964 is irrelevant).

7. As regard whether “the British were impartial observers,” I assume
(?) that the authors are referring to this statement in my book: “[The
British records'] many authors were both bureaucrats and firsthand
observers on the ground, recording clinically and commenting candidly.”
• Indeed the British writing these reports, in their
non-public inter-government communications upon which I relied, did
usually record clinically (this happened, that happened...), whereas in
their comments they were candid, expressing their feelings (not
clinical). As far as “impartial” (a word I did not use), it must not be
forgotten that the British were the ones who enabled, and continued to
enable, the entire Zionist
project. So to suggest that they were in general biased against the
Zionists seems odd.

8. About the 1948 ‘civil war’:
• Ignoring the Report’s comical imagery of
“Zionist aggressors picking a fight with peaceful Arabs”, yes, I stand
by the point: that from the beginning of WWII through to the summer of
1947, virtually all of the terrorism in Palestine was Zionist, and once
the reality of the Zionist state was assured (which in practical terms
came upon the announcement of the UNSCOP recommendations, before
Resolution 181), the Zionists began redirecting their violence to assure
an ‘Arab threat’.
• There were of course also incidents of individual
Palestinian violence that began resurfacing by the summer of 1947. Not
only does my book not ignore these, but indeed my book pushes up the
beginnings of this resurgence earlier than previously thought.

9. The authors’ final “Pillar” is my claim that “the Hagana secretly
supported the actions of the Irgun.”
• This cooperation is abundantly illustrated by the behavior of the
gangs, with collaboration ebbing and flowing with the times. As a defence summary put it, “the
Hagana will have a lot of its dirty work done for it, without carrying
any responsibility”.
• The
authors cite an interview with Teddy Kollek in support of my
claim of cooperation among the gangs, which shows Hagana attempts to
recruit members of the other gangs. I quote from it, as the authors do,
that none were willing to lose their identity to the others, but due to
my own editing error, the phrase
the authors object to ("Hagana and Irgun would agree on a particular
terror attack, the Irgun would carry it out, and the Jewish Agency would
then publicly
condemn it") belongs to the defence summary in my next
sentence. The quote is correct, but was orphaned into the wrong sentence
due to a bad rewrite. This error has been on
my list of errata.
• Another issue is the report's use of the phrase "there can be no
question [etc]" which the authors, in retrospect probably correctly,
interpret in the negative, and I interpret in the positive, the
linguistic issue being whether it is followed by "of" or "that".
Nonetheless the fact is that many terror attacks were Hagana-Irgun or
even Hagana-Irgun-Lehi collaborations.
• The authors' allegation that I paint too general an image of this
inter-gang cooperation is inaccurate. Quite the contrary, what I do,
drawing from British records, is record a much less black-and-white
reality than the common idea of a specific period that began and ended,
as the authors would have it.

Other criticisms of State of Terror in the Report but
not in the "Pillars":

Rabbi Herzog
• The authors make
much of my claim of a kidnapping trip by Rabbi Herzog in 1946. Here they
engage in the same device Mr. Hoffman used in his
failed complaint to the House of Lords — they refer to page 28 in my
book, where I make a passing reference to this issue but
which is not my
account of Rabbi Herzog’s trip, and then claim I cite as evidence only a
NY Times article and Prof. Yosef Grodzinsky’s book, In the Shadow of the
Holocaust, neither of which is the source I cite. They then dismiss the
Herzog papers, and their proof of the profound resistance Herzog faced
from European Jewish communities, by claiming that I do not understand the
Holocaust. They are free to interpret Herzog’s actions in apparent
contradiction to what he wrote — they are not free to falsify my
citations or claim I am misrepresenting the evidence.

Ben-Gurion's oft-cited 1938 statement about saving Jewish
children
The authors refute my condemnation of Ben-Gurion's statement by claiming
that no one, not even the Nazis, knew what would happen over the next
few years.
• This is a peculiar claim — even though no one predicted the full
horror of the Holocaust in 1938, to claim that Jews were not known to be
in serious mortal danger is astonishing revisionism. But the Report
accuses me of "falsely endow[ing] Ben Gurion with this foresight".
Really? After five years of Nazi rule?
• But even this is irrelevant. Ben-Gurion's words are explicitly built
on the premise of Jewish children
being murdered.
• Further, I cite Hagana member Hanna Braun, who noted that this was not
a one-time statement, that she knows he repeated and meant it. (The
authors dismiss her.)
• The Report cleverly uses the date July, 1938 in relation to
Ben-Gurion's speech, extracting that from a previous sentence. But the
speech was December, as I state. This is important because that was a
month after Kristallnacht,
• Finally, the Jewish Agency's highest priority during the war, even
after word of the Holocaust began to reach the world in November 1942,
remained Zionism.

Reconstruction
• From when Mr. Hoffman first
disrupted a book talk of mine in November
2016, he was particularly outraged by my statement that the Jewish
Agency was against Reconstruction, and this remains a key complaint of
the authors. They now claim that it was a minority view, not that of the
leadership, and allege that the statements of Ben-Gurion refer only to
reconstruction in Palestine, not Europe. (This in itself would beg
explanation.) But the interpretation is at odds with the explanation by,
for example, the settlement member named Newton, who reported that "They
were not interested in Jewish rehabilitation in Europe. They were afraid
that with the improvement of conditions in Europe the pressure on
Palestine would subside."
• Further, in early 1948, as the Marshall Plan was about to be
implemented, even the NY Times was reporting that Zionist leaders were
telling politicians that they cannot be both pro-Marshall and
pro-Zionist.
• By the war's end, the British were reporting a general feeling against
improvement in Europe among the settlements, since many felt it would
make the quest for a Zionist state more difficult. This is all cited.

The destruction of the Iraqi Jewish community
• This complaint was already addressed in the complaint to the House of
Lords. The authors dismiss my "claim that that [sic] Israel destroyed the
Iraqi Jewish community." They achieve this by first substituting the
events at issuse in the early 1950s with a separate issue a decade
earlier, in 1941, where there was anti-Jewish violence in Iraq (and
certainly no evidence of Zionist conspiracy), and then fudging the actual
events ten years later.
•
As regards the 1941 violence, the authors criticise me for refusing to
assume that "Arabs" were the cause. To be sure, I never dismiss the
possibility, but I also present the (likely) theory that it was a British false
flag operation to provide a pretext for their continued control. This
claim is well known, for example by the Iraqi Jew Naeim Giladi, whose
account the authors of course dismiss; But I also introduce new evidence from
classified documents that I successfully got the British to release
(CO 733/420/19), and which the authors fail to mention. These documents,
despite being heavily redacted, support Giladi's claim,
though they do not (as I make clear in
my book) categorically prove it.
• As regards the Report's political motivation for this
excercise, the irony is that
CO 733/420/19 also contain new information about
the Mufti's connection to the Italian fascists, and I also bring this
out in my book. Yet the authors ignore my citing this new Mufti-fascist
evidence, and instead Mr. Hoffman
falsely alleged to the House of Lords that my book does not mention the
Mufti's well-known meeting with Hitler.
• When the Report does advance to the 1950s and the flight of Iraqi
Jews, it ignores the fact that the Zionist terror ring was exposed, it
ignores the testimony of British witnesses, it ignores the words of a
CIA agent then present, and it ignores the additional evidence I supply,
not to my knowledge previously published: that Israel, though
ill-equipped, refused any help in airlifting the tens of thousands of
Iraqi Jews left homeless, cold, and hungry as result of the "emergency",
and threatened to impound any airplane that tried. If indeed there was a
fear of Iraqi Jews being harmed by their "Arab" countrymen, how does one
explain this behavior? All this is ignored by the authors.

Citation method
•
The authors repeatedly criticized my method of identifying specific
documents in the National Archives, and of the frustration it caused
them in locating the documents (or failing to try). This is gratuitous: while some folders
at Kew consist of pages that are numbered in some organized fashion,
others consist of hundreds of loose, often unrelated sheets, that bear
either no numbering at all, or several contradictory numbers, or
duplicated numbers, resulting from previous archiving. I strove to use
the most visible, non-duplicated method of identifying the particular
document. For example, the authors question a quote I attribute to
Sharret (Shertok), by saying “We attempted to check this file but it is
massive. Without further location information, it’s not possible to find
the document to which Suarez refers.” Indeed, the folder contains a variety of papers
and no sequential numbering, they would have had to look for the sheet
entitled ‘Situation Report’, ‘2’, with the Sharret quote. It took me a few
minutes to locate it again — it is as described.
This is the nature of these documents, not a failure of my
method.